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SEPTEMBER 17, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
A Blend of Jerusalem & L.A., Ashkenaz & Sephardi, Lemon & Za’atar TJH Speaks with Sina Mizrahi, Author of Good Food BY SUSAN SCHWAMM Sina, you just came out with your first cookbook, Good Food. Tell us about us a bit about your background. I’m from Montreal originally, and I grew up with a mother who was always cooking and always in the kitchen. That was my normal. My mother never really let me into the kitchen, so I never really cooked myself. But in my head, I would think to myself: “When I get married, I’ll be just like my mother,” because that’s what I knew. But when I did get married, I wasn’t like my mother. I didn’t know how to cook at all. I literally called my friend and asked her how to make pasta. And it was just very funny. But I always felt this connection to making a meal and connecting around the table through good food. That’s how I grew up. Eventually, I started cooking a lot. I would cook with my mother on the phone all the time and was always asking people around me for recipes. I always had this desire to be able to be comfortable in the kitchen. And then, I became not just comfortable, I started being creative in the kitchen, because most of my family doesn’t cook with recipes at all. They just tell you what they did, what they put in, and you have to figure out the measurements, etc. by yourself. So that’s how I grew into cooking. When I had two kids, I felt like I needed to express myself creatively. I started learning photography. I would usually take photos of my kids, but they started disliking it, and I was frustrated. So I discovered this thing called a food blog. When I saw it, I felt, “Wow, that was exactly what I’d love to do. Photography, cooking, writing – everything together.” And so I started a food blog. What year did you start your blog? In 2011.
Ten years. That’s amazing. Yes. In September, right before Rosh Hashana. You just jumped in and didn’t know if it was going to take off or not. What were your feelings then? For me, it wasn’t even about taking off or not. That wasn’t even in my head. It was more like I was like, “Wow, there’s this medium where you could share things” – kind of like some people share their crafts or their knitting or whatever. For me, I felt, “I can share this part of me. Whoever wants to join, whoever wants to stick around, whoever wants to share with me can join.” But I wasn’t thinking about it at all in the sense of how is this going to grow? I wanted to enjoy the process. And I was really enjoying it. And, then, obviously, I started making connections, meeting other Jewish culture food bloggers. Then Instagram took off, and everything just evolved one after the other. Truthfully, I always had this dream in the back of my head. I would say to myself, “Wow, I love books. Imagine making a cookbook.” And, b’ezrat Hashem, it happened, eventually. But along the journey, and still today, you write recipes for magazines. You wrote for Binah. You write for Mishpacha. Once I started blogging more consistently and really sharing my things, I thought it would be great to be published. I reached out to Binah, and that’s how I started. I worked with them for many, many years – five, six years. And then when I came from Israel to Lakewood, I actually switched over to working with Mishpacha. I felt that it was just a better fit in terms of the audience and having connection to my recipes, because my recipes are not so “heimish”; they’re much more,
honestly, Sephardi and have that kind of modern edge to them. The truth is, Middle Eastern food has become very mainstream in the last 10 years or so. When did you concretize the idea that you wanted to write this cookbook? It was always in the back of my head. Food bloggers have this as a benchmark: “I want to write a cookbook.” It just feels like it’s a milestone. But it really only came into fruition when I was actually working on a different project. I was going to write something with a different blogger, and it didn’t come to be. And then I said to myself, “You know what? I really want to focus on making a cookbook.” And then when I moved to Lakewood, I found that this was a great time to start, because all my kids were out of the house during the day. I decided to put it out there and see if they were interested in publishing a book that I would write. Baruch Hashem, they were, so here we are. How long did it take, start to finish, to create this book? From the day I signed the contract with ArtScroll, it took a year. What’s so impressive about your book is that besides for writing the recipes, which is an art and an avodah of itself, you also did the photography. Yes. I did. Photography, I guess, is your first love. But how did it work out to write the book and to also photograph the food along the way? It was very, very intense. When you flip through a cookbook it looks a little effortless, like, “OK, you make a recipe, take a photo. You’re
